Hope found at a soup kitchen...

Most days (and it seems like we have been here for far more than 2 days) are not as planned. We did do some more shopping for the transit centre at the railway station. Then, as we were getting nowhere with 'official' procedures, we just started talking to people waiting in the queue, once we had found either a volunteer or one of the Ukrainians who could translate. Most people, it has to be said, don't want to come to the UK, they want to stay in Poland so they are nearer their own country - either because they have a father, husband, etc, still in Ukraine or they think they will somehow be able to return home. We will never forget the emptiness in some of the women's eyes, particularly the older ones, and if they even begin to talk about what has happened the veneer of 'just coping' breaks down. 
But some people do want to come to the UK and no one, including the Polish volunteers, had heard of the Homes for Ukraine scheme - great job done by the British government!
We then had a break through with the bureaucracy problem of not being able to get into any of the volunteer centres without our credentials being checked by police, which was going to take hours. We got to know an English-speaking volunteer who has a working relationship with police - he took us to a police van outside the station, where our ID was checked in minutes and the job was done!
We then made our way to what can only be described as a huge soup kitchen/food tent, staffed by volunteers of all nationalities, outside of which we soon had a small queue of people wanting more information. We have made a number of contacts and hope to either establish, or finalise, the connection between sponsor and refugees.
We feel that we will have more families than we yet have sponsors for, which would be very sad, and so we encourage anyone who is able to host a person or family, or knows someone who is able to, to contact us at trawden4ukraine@hotmail.com.
And so the end of a busy, emotional and more hopeful day. Tomorrow morning at 8:30 we will be peeling fruit and veg in the soup kitchen - first photo attached of this and second of the items bought this morning). 

Comments

  1. Steve22 March 2022 at 11:07

    Sounds like things are starting to come together, well done👍xx

    ReplyDelete

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